Bringing innovation to underdeveloped markets
Our client’s backstory
The bank is one of the biggest global corporate and investment banks present in 30 countries and one of the market leaders in Algeria, serving retail and corporate customers across the country offering savings, payment, lending, leasing, investment, and other products and services.
Looking to bring innovation to its subsidiaries in less developed markets, the bank saw an opportunity to fasten and advance its services in Algeria with digital transformation and cutting-edge technologies by brining mobile banking and modern banking solutions to the country- and being one of the first ones to do so.
The challenges
As with any traditional bank whose core services were heavily reliant on a legacy system, the bank had to find a way to build modern banking solutions on top of the legacy system and enable a smooth transition to a more modern and more flexible system.
The other challenge was to overcome the legal roadblocks in Algeria as the law required following specific regulations in terms of server usage, storage and customer data privacy.
The subsidiary needed to find a reliable partner to carry out the project and Klika was selected as an exclusive partner to build this solution in collaboration with a German digital banking startup. Four different languages and teams in four countries was something that wasn’t making things easier.
Klika solution
To establish communication with the legacy system, Klika built a middleware microservice system architecture and web services and provided a RestAPI interface for modern mobile banking applications for iPhone and Android users.
Klika also built the accompanying mobile application (including UX/UI design) that serves bank’s customers while on the go. One of the first steps was building a comprehensive but seamless onboarding experience that allows for online identity verification (KYC). We used the third-party service IDNow and two-factor authentication to make the registration process fast and user-friendly. The mobile application was one of the first mobile banking solutions in Algeria that allowed customers to open a bank account online, as well as order and manage credit cards (blocking cards, setting transaction limits, re-ordering card PIN), order checks, etc.
Besides enabling standard banking payments through the applications, we developed functionalities like P2P transfers to provide better user experience when sending money to contacts and near-contact payments with limited transfer times.
Multi-accounts, savings accounts and loans were features that were built in addition to the basic set of functionalities.
On top of building mobile application Klika helped develop a back office customer support portal as a web application that allowed the support team to help their customers troubleshoot any application or account issues.
Results
The application was initially built for 20,000 customers and today it serves more than 500,000 users, which shows how flexible and stable the system is. We worked with the bank subsidiary for almost three years until all processes were set and ready to be passed on to the bank’s inhouse team for further maintenance.
Technology stack
iOS, Swift, Android, Java/Spring, Ruby on Rails, Redis, Docker/Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ
